BMC Compuware Strobe vs SCOM comparison

Compuware Strobe is the industry-leading mainframe application performance management and analysis solution for mainframe applications. With Strobe, IT departments can pinpoint application inefficiencies that cause excessive CPU consumption, elongated elapsed times and reduce hardware and software costs while increasing customer satisfaction.

With Strobe, mainframe teams can:

• Locate and improve resource-consumptive database calls
• Identify tuning opportunities to reduce monthly software licensing costs (MLC)
• Resolve performance issues before they impact application service levels
• Apply analytics to captured data to produce reports showing high-resource consumption and applications that need tuning
• Measure activity of both online and batch-processing applications in single and multiple- system environments
• Identify several I/O problems, including inefficient VSAM file buffering
• Create and schedule automatic, reusable measurements
• Automatically detect performance problems by using a rolling average of CPU consumption and elapsed-time metrics

SCOM (System Center Operations Manager) is a cross-platform data center monitoring and reporting tool that checks the status of various objects defined within the environment, such as server hardware, system services, etc. The solution allows data center administrators to deploy, configure, manage, and monitor the operations, services, devices and applications of multiple enterprise IT systems via a single pane of glass. It is suitable for businesses of all sizes.

SCOM Features

SCOM has many valuable key features. Some of the most useful ones include:

• Application monitoring
• Database monitoring
• Threshold alerts
• IT Asset Discovery
• Predictive capabilities
• Server usage monitoring and capacity forecasting
• Application performance management console
• Server availability and performance monitoring
• Collaboration tools
• Virtualization monitoring
• Patch management
• Out-of-the box templates to monitor applications
• Application dependency mapping and thresholding

SCOM Benefits

There are several benefits to implementing SCOM. Some of the biggest advantages the solution offers include:

• Management and monitoring of Windows as well as Unix/Linux platforms
• Remotely connect to Windows machines and perform administrative tasks from the console itself
• Custom dashboard creation to help monitor the datacenter with ease
• Agent based monitoring
• Integrates well with other Microsoft products
• Easy to use and reliable

Reviews from Real Users

Below are some reviews and helpful feedback written by PeerSpot users currently using the SCOM solution.

A Manager at a financial services firm says, “The feature I like most about SCOM is that it is easy-to-use. I find it very user-friendly. I also like the knowledge base which it has. You can find the resolution to questions or issues directly within the SCOM itself. It will alert you with a recommendation of what you need to do at the same time. This sort of self-diagnosis or prompting is one of the great values you get from SCOM compared to other solutions.”

PeerSpot user Zahari Z., Information Technology Auditor at a financial services firm, mentions, “Availability monitoring is the feature I have found most valuable, as well as the capacity and ability to send notifications. There is a mechanism to set up a notification from the SCOM and whenever there is a drop in the availability the notification alerts not only for availability but for other issues as well. You can align thresholds according to the speed of your environment and you can have a threshold related notification, which is one of the useful features.”

Bill W., Sr. Systems Engineer at Arapahoe County Government, comments, “ I like some of their newer features, such as maintenance schedules, because SCOM records SLA and SLO time. When we patch, things are automatically put into maintenance mode so that the numbers for our systems being down, do not count against us.”

A Project Manager at a tech services company explains, “The feature I have found most valuable is the book feature. While we run the Sprint one we can add some setups for multiple sprints.”

A Systems Engineer at an educational organization states, “Because it's Windows-based, it actually reports quite well. It reports everything you can think of on the Windows server and allows you to monitor anything. It's excellent for those in the Windows world as it's very good at it.”